The Internet provides access to an ever increasing quantity of web sites, which may contain a wide variety of content items. Client devices, communicatively coupled to the Internet, are able to access various websites which may contain images, video, audio clips, documents, etc. Access to websites is typically made available through use of a browser installed on a client device of a given user. The given user specifies a uniform resource locator (“URL”) of a content item, e.g., a website or webpage, which the given user wishes to access.
Many users of client devices who access the Internet often view hundreds or thousands of web sites or web pages during a given time period, such as a single month. Often, users may wish to revisit a given website or webpage that contains content the user wishes to view, listen to, etc., at a later date. For example, a user may perform research on a given topic and identify a website or a webpage that contains information that the user wishes to further review. Through use of an Internet browser bookmark, the user may store a pointer or link to the website or webpage, allowing the user to directly access the website or webpage at a later date without having to search or spend time locating the URL associated with the website or webpage. A bookmark to a website or webpage may be stored by the Internet browser with which the bookmark was generated. Thereafter, a user of a client device may review the bookmarks stored by a given Internet browser and select a given bookmark, causing the browser to directly access the website or webpage associated with the selected bookmark.
Similarly, bookmarks for a given user to one or more content items may be stored by an bookmark storage provider, such as Yahoo!. For example, the Yahoo! MyWeb® service allows users to store bookmarks to content items in a central network accessible location, allowing users to access the bookmarks from any client device coupled to the Internet. Services, such as Yahoo! MyWeb®, may also permit users to access various bookmarks generated and stored by their friends, family members, buddies, or other members of one or more social networks to which a given user belongs.
The bookmarks generated by a given user are often associated with a wide variety of content items. For example, a given user of a client device may access a news webpage containing an article of interest to the user. Similarly, the user may access a webpage containing a video clip of a movie the user wishes to view. Additionally, the user may access a webpage containing an image file or an audio file of particular song. The user may generate a bookmark for each of the content items in order to gain direct access to the content items at a late date.
The bookmarks that a given user generates may be associated with one or more keywords describing a given bookmarked content item, which may be referred to as tags. For example, a bookmark generated for a news article associated with computers may be stored with the tags “computer,” “technology,” “news,” “article.” Similarly, a bookmark generated for a movie video clip may be stored in conjunction with the tags “video,” “funny,” “favorite clips,” whereas a bookmark generated for an audio clip may be stored with the tags “rock,” “music,” “Phish,” “awesome.”
The plurality of bookmarks generated by users of client devices are typically stored in a simple structure, such as a flat file or folder on a storage device, and presented to a user of a client device in a list format with the description or tag that corresponds to the bookmark. While tags and folders associated with the plurality of bookmarks provide a means of accessing bookmarks that are described by the tag or contained in the folder, many users have not diligently applied either organizational approach to the vast majority of their bookmarks. As a consequence, while the purpose of a bookmark is to provide a user with direct access to a given content item, often locating a given bookmark among hundreds or thousands of bookmarks in a list is more time consuming and difficult than performing a new search via a search engine to locate the desired content item.
Current methods and systems for generating, storing, and presenting bookmarks a given user of client device thus fail to provide users with an organized structure for reviewing and accessing bookmarks. In order to overcome shortcomings associated with existing techniques for storing and accessing bookmarks, embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for utilizing tag data associated with addresses (e.g., URLs) corresponding to bookmarks, thereby allowing the storage and presentation of bookmarks to users in an organized structure, facilitating efficient and direct access to bookmarked content items.